Career

If you found your way here from Medium, you already know the backstory. The layoff. The relocation. The certifications. The grind. If you haven’t read it, start there — it sets the context for everything here. This site is the next chapter. What This Is Beyond The Cert is where I document what happens after you pass the exam. Not the study guides. Not the practice tests. The part that comes after — when you realize the certification got you in the door, but what’s behind it is a whole different conversation. ...

You see the announcement: “I passed the CKA!” Here’s what you don’t see: My story? 41 → 47 → 65 → 81. Four attempts. Three failures. One certification. Here’s what actually happened. The Beginning: September to December 2025 I’d just passed the RHCSA in September 2025. Working in a heavy Kubernetes shop, I figured the CKA would give me the baseline I needed. I knew what K8s was, but I’d never worked with it in a production environment. My company hired me with light K8s skills — now it was time to formalize them. ...

I haven’t posted on Medium since August of 2022. A lot changed and has happened since then. When I last wrote, I was four weeks into my first tech role. Six months of grinding through a DevOps bootcamp had finally paid off. From accountant to engineer — the switch was real. So started to enjoy the fruits of my labor, lived a little. As a result I stopped learning outside of work. I got comfortable. ...